Category: Factual

Why do people believe silly stuff like that a man can be a woman just by saying so?

Or that marriage doesn’t have anything to do with reproduction, and that we can call any arrangement, regardless of its reproductive potential, marriage? And ignore the blatantly obvious place that marriage has at the nexus of reproduction and civilization?

Why does everyone act as though they see no potential problem whatsoever with importing highly nepotistic groups with incompatible cultures and oppositional values into a society whose most prominent characteristics are extreme tolerance and sub-fertility reproduction?

Why do so many European people hate their ancestors and why have so many decided, consciously or otherwise, to surrender to the onslaught of comfort, luxury, and entertainment, and give up their continued existence?

Why are people just going along with taking children away from their parents for witholding from them gender-mutilating drugs and sugery?

Why are Internet corporations and governmental bodies openly collaborating to impose political censorship in public discussion spaces?

Why are massively powerful corporations exhaustively burning up millions of years worth of built-up organic energy in the span of a few 100 years, why are governments allowing nearly every square mile of the planet to be disturbed by humans, if not outright genocided into a monoculture for humans?

Why is there so little resistance to all this? These are all things that don’t have to be that way. They could easily change if people changed their behaviours; it’s not like it would be some monumental task like going to the moon.

Because everyone thinks it’s not easy, they think it’s impossible. Everyone thinks the system is unstoppable like a runnaway train. If they have the modicum of an attention span it takes to realize what’s going on, then they simultaneously realize the futility of a single person’s actions.

Eveyone knows that if they even speak up, they’ll achieve nothing but misery.

The entire herd is out of its mind, it’s just running, sprinting, mindlessly charging in whatever direction each human thinks the herd is travelling towards.

Some people think this is going somewhere, or fleeing from something, so they constantly make frantic guesses about what will be ideologically stylish in the next moment so they can get there first.

It’s not hard to recognize a stampede, but it is hard to stop. If every animal just stopped running, the stampede would instantly end, but every animal knows that if they stop, they’ll get trampled. And everyone else will think they’re a moron.

For humans, that’s the worst part. Yeah, getting trampled is bad, but the worst would be eveyone thinking you’re an idiot for getting trampled.

And so the whole herd continues the stampede, charging over the cliff into the void.

If European peoples decided they wanted to continue to exist in the future, would there be a way for them to do that without being hated? Or if, when they become a minority everywhere (globally and in each of their countries), would they be able to work together to try to prevent bad things from happening to them, like other groups do, without being hated?

Seems like they’ll be less able to prevent bad things from happening to them (like others taking their stuff, or killing or raping them) if they’re a minority that can’t defend themselves, and, looking at history, it seems pretty naive to think others wouldn’t take advantage of them like that. Assuming things would be fine in that scenario is a pretty big gamble.

Panicking is almost always a bad idea, and stuff like “racial pride” or “superiority” just doesn’t make sense to me, and feel like a weird waste of time. I think it’s a good idea to not get distracted by that kooky stuff, and think about current conditions and future trends with a clear, calm, open, honest mind.

Back in the day people knew what was real because they could walk on it, they could see it, everything about their world was understandable in the context of their physical surroundings. Concepts in their head were like the kinds of things that were right around them, things they could directly interact with. A motive like hunger could be directly connected to the physical world in basic steps through things like hunting or foraging.

To hunt, they might need a spear, which is made of tree and stone, just like their environment; their tools were recognizable in their source materials, and those were a regular component of their environment. The relation between a tool and its raw material was a process done with their own hands, right in front of their faces. Hunting itself is something they could readily spot in their environment: many fellow animals can be observed to hunt. The connections between the concepts in their head nicely mirrored the connections between the objects in their world. Forming that correspondence didn’t have to be a conscious process–mere observation produced it.

Now we have concepts in our head that don’t correspond to anything physical or concrete. We have things like the Internet or vaccines, where our understanding of how they work is very different from the way we interact with them. What does getting poked in the arm have to do with antigens and possibly dying 10 years from now? What does poking a bright screen to talk to a friend have to do with TCP/IP packets, RISC processors, or rare earth elements? Even many of our labels, our tokens for communication are acronyms, which are an extra layer of abstraction.

And that’s just consumer technology; the same is true with politics, for example. How, if at all, does marking a paper beside someone’s name relate to changes in wealth received from work, or to changes in what will be demanded of us in the future?

If we get hungry, we go to the store to get food, which is a processed product, which means the ingredients and their source are unknown except as abstract classification (made from apple, not any specific apple, not even any specific cultivar, and definitely not an apple that was in this hand, picked from a known, specific tree) and means we get it by giving currency (which can take many forms, made from many different materials, somehow, issued by some organization running in some unknown way, controlled by people who want to remain unknown).

Everything we interact with is just the surface layer and beneath it are layers upon layers of abstraction, and the vast majority of people, if not everyone, don’t know all the layers between the concepts we have in our heads that let us interact with it and the physical reality around us that we can see and touch. There are entire fields of knowledge, entire communities of individuals, complete layers of reality that mostly everyone is unaware of.

There is no ground to our reality. We know some tips and tricks that let us get by in this world (until new technology changes it), but without knowing all the sub-surface layers (which is probably impossible now), we can only make guesses about what’s real. We’re not even sure of what kind of things are possible.

We don’t know what’s underneath the surface, and so we have no way of knowing if or when the surface will give out or fail, so every step we make feels like a risk, as if we’re walking on thin ice, except that there’s no water underneath: we have no idea what’s underneath.

On some level, we know that at any give time, in the next moment we may be falling into an abyss, and so we have an ever-present subconscious sense of vertigo.

One attempt to adapt to this situation is to just pretend it’s not a problem, to not worry about what’s beneath the surface, to only take things at face value, and to unthinkingly accept any absurdities that this inevitably results in.

Maybe that’s what most people are doing right now–it would explain a lot.

Tangential

Opening your heart to someone new is scary. Allowing yourself to love someone is dangerous because it brings with it the possibility of pain from rejection, betrayal, and loss. Love can be kept secret, and that can protect oneself from some harm, but love is more fully manifested when it’s mutual, and truly loving someone means wanting to protect them, which means taking some possibility of harm upon oneself, removing it from the loved one.

Love is inherently dangerous, it’s unavoidably a risk.

Opening your mind to new ideas is scary. Allowing yourself to question your assumptions and consider new ones is dangerous because it brings with it the possibility of pain from uncertainty, confusion, and thinking differently from those around you. Different thoughts can be kept secret, but even hidden uncertainty and confusion is stressful, and progressing beyond that state to new assumptions may lead to new conclusions and convictions that compel the public defense of newly discovered truth.

Open mindedness is inherently dangerous, it’s unavoidably a risk.

We can decide to not care about uncertainty and confusion, but that’s essentially the same as not caring about truth, which is unacceptable and unworkable to those with an internally-arising motivation for honesty.

We can boldly declare that we don’t care what others think of us, but it’s difficult to overstate how much most people value social approval. Many put it above love, some put it above life itself and kill themselves when opinion turns against them.

Open mindedness requires courage. It’s easy to dismiss this as braggadocio, but dishonesty is often easy, and we could just as easily dismiss that dismissal as cowardice.

During most of Kim’s pregnancy we were trying to decide if Jupiter was too crazy of a name, or if it was just crazy enough. Theodore was an easier pick; we had both independently thought of it as a possibility.

On the afternoon of November 25, 2018, more than a week after the due date, Kim wondered aloud whether Jupiter the planet was in the current zodiac sign. A few hours later I checked, and it wasn’t–Sagittarius is the current zodiac sign, and Jupiter is just entering Scorpius.

Jupiter’s position in the zodiac was not significant, but it turns out that Jupiter’s birth in Sagittarius is.

The zodiac system that is most common in the west is called the Tropical Zodiac, and traces back to Ptolemy. In the 2nd century AD he collected astrological knowledge in his Tetrabibilo. Book 1 Chapter 17 contains this:

The planets also have familiarity with the parts of the zodiac, through what are called their houses, triangles, exaltations, terms, and the like. The system of houses is of the following nature. Since of the twelve signs the most northern, which are closer than the others to our zenith and therefore most productive of heat and of warmth are Cancer and Leo, they assigned these to the greatest and most powerful heavenly bodies, that is, to the luminaries, as houses, Leo, which is masculine, to the sun and Cancer, feminine, to the moon. In keeping with this they assumed the semicircle from Leo to Capricorn to be solar and that from Aquarius to Cancer to be lunar, so that in each of the semicircles One sign might be assigned to each of the five planets as its own, One bearing aspect to the sun and the other to the moon, consistently with the spheres of their motion and the peculiarities of their natures. For to Saturn, in whose nature cold prevails, as opposed to heat, and which occupies the orbit highest and farthest from the luminaries, were assigned the signs opposite Cancer and Leo, namely Capricorn and Aquarius, with the additional reason that these signs are cold and wintry, and further that their diametrical aspect is not consistent with beneficence. To Jupiter, which is moderate and below Saturn’s sphere, were assigned the two signs next to the foregoing, windy and fecund, Sagittarius and Pisces, in triangular aspect to the luminaries, which is a harmonious and beneficent configuration.

Jupiter our boy was conceived in Pisces and born in Sagittarius.

That’s not all: early on November 26th, three days before the birth of the boy, the planet moved into conjunction with the Earth on the other side of the Sun. You can look towards him, but you can’t really see Jupiter right now because he’s just emerging from behind the brilliance of the Sun.

To top it off, he was born on Thursday, ie Thor’s Day. Thor is identified with Jupiter, as seen in the French name for the day: Jeudi, Jupiter Day.

Kim had also wondered whether there were any King Theodores. The one we found, King Theodore of Corsica, was a German adventurer who in 1736 convinced a group of Corsican rebels to name him their King in return for helping them liberate their island from Genoese occupation. With military aid from the Bey of Tunis, he landed on Corsica in March and waged a war of independence for nine months until he left to secure more foreign military aid in November. These months correspond with our Theodore’s reign in his island womb.

In Nevada, which should have been the hottest and driest stretch of the trip, or so I thought, ignorantly assuming north was the same as south, after brief periods of minor showers we made our way to the western half of the state. Cruising along in calm air, a sudden change of wind hit us head-on, bringing a cold ominous foreboding that physically slowed our progress, and mentally assaulted my resolve, so that, in confusion, I stopped at a barren rest stop, void of even a single wall as shelter. But there was nothing to do, nothing but go on right into the thick of the menacing storm heralded by the bitter relentless gale. My resolve would be tested yet further as the wind pierced deeper, driving cold wet closer to our souls. Not heat and aridness would we find, but winding roads littered with fog, snow, and mud–and of course a most beautiful sunset. Other bikers turned around. We shrugged as they passed and turned our faces forward, the throttle open, and the handlebars naught.

On the other side of it, tired and shaking uncontrollably and rattling frozen bones, I proposed an early stop–why not right here? It was not too far till sundown. Kim was unreceptive and indomitably undeterred, thankfully dragging me out of my momentary weakness. We’ll say the back seat is shielded, more pleasant, less draining. That’s what we’ll say. Knowingly into the dark trap, then. We let the sun duck under the hills and spring an ambush, catching us on the road with a falling shroud of darkness. Groping blindly along the highway, occasionally accompanied by one of the shrugged-at bikers who’d apparently decided to turn around a second time, we snaked westward. At the hotel, we booked the last room and received free cookies.

A grim glorious day that was, but perhaps not as grim as the escape from San Francisco. The transportation networks were choked with traffic; a plethorous mass of human flesh clogging the roads out of San Francisco, slowing the flow to fully stationary, punctuated by brief rolls forward half the length of a car. Even outside the city, the swelling hominid profusity pressed out and filled all spaces, not sparing the “in and out burger” we stopped at. Living talking ape meat spread its teeming overabundance into every seat and table so that we were forced out when we eventually received our order, and we ate outside. The masticating mass was repulsively nauseating. As repulsively nauseating as the pink centre of my burger, which I pushed down my throat in a clinically calculating decision to gain nourishment to counter sleepiness without needing to stop at another restaurant. A cheery employee walked by and asked how the food was. I gave him a cold, dead, “it’s pink”. As dead and cold as the centre of my burger. “What?” “The burger is pink.” “So… that’s good?” “No. It’s bad.” “Oh… sorry.” And he walked away.

Later we rolled into Mark and Shannon’s driveway with the relief of Atlas at the apocalypse.

Man is the only beast capable of becoming enthralled to television. He is alone in his desire to turn from reality and life and fixate on the hypnotizing hypercolour display. Unlike the lesser beasts whose existence is tied closely to the world and life around them, he is seemingly freed from the necessity of struggling for sustenance and survival. But he is a natural born slave, and seeks a new master immediately upon release. This he finds in television, and he gladly submits to its remaking of him fully, from the toes up, in its own image. The other beasts are immune to its enticing glow, and instead must be ripped apart and rendered into the new oversaturated and overexposed existence by force, as they flee. Man reclines dumbly into blissful oblivion and welcomes the damaging overstimulation to his senses, and the toxic hypercolor poison blasted into his mind. The fullness of sunlight and its broadly continuous spectrum which nourishes a teeming superorganism of unfathomable beauty and nuance is supplanted and made dull in comparison to the dominating harsh plastic brilliance of the screen’s discreet cold chromatic distillations. Invigorated by its supple prey, television evolves quickly into the apex predator of man’s attention, its obscene glare and hum outcompeting and drowning out all thought in man that is not television. But the wind and beasts and thermodynamic laws have no mental glandes to tickle and continue unperturbed by television. Man’s neglected civilization crumbles around him beside his unwatching eyes, and the synthetic tentacles that went forth from it to give birth to television go slack. A vestigial glow from the unpowered screen shows the deflation and unravelling of the new man in the absence of his animating essence; his flickering screen and hyperstimulation. Flashless to flashless, dull to dull.